The February issue of Glamour features Zooey Deschanel on the cover, and inside, she talks about what all lady-celebs find themselves talking about these days: Body image and feminism.
The body image stuff is a little strange, because, well, Zooey D is thin. Sure, she has talked about being chubby when she was 12 and how kids were mean to her and spit in her face, but she is not currently residing anywhere near fat. Still, she feels strongly about the differences between slender, thin and skinny, telling Glamour:
“Actresses have definitely gotten thinner over the course of my lifetime. Women I admired growing up- Debra Winger, Diane Keaton, Meryl Streep-were all beautiful and thin, but not too thin. There are a lot of actresses who are unhealthy-skinny-much, much too skinny. You can’t Pilates to that. I’m a very small person, and if I lost 15 pounds, I’d look like them; it’s scary. For young girls, what does that say? You need to look this way to be successful? That’s not true. You do not need to look or be anorexic to be successful in Hollywood. The range of what’s acceptable is larger than what people believe.”
Um, okay, sure, ZD. But Diane Keaton is (and was) pretty fucking thin. And has admitted to being bulimic. Debra Winger and Meryl Streep??? These were — and are — slender ladies.
Have body types in Hollywood gotten thinner? Yes. The 90210 kids of today could fit their entire bodies into one leg of the jeans worn by the 90210 kids of yesterday. And in model land, slender-but-not-skeletal ladies like Cindy Crawford have been replaced by much leaner women like Candice Swanpoel. Tina Fey had to lose 30 pounds to get on SNL. And while there are more body types on TV these days, it’s slightly naive to think all types are acceptable. There are leading parts for thin women and sassy sidekick parts for fat women and very little for anyone in between.
But on to the feminism part! You’ve got to admire Zooey’s pluck when faced with a question about her critics:
“I’m just being myself. There is not an ounce of me that believes any of that crap that they say. We can’t be feminine and be feminists and be successful? I want to be a fucking feminist and wear a fucking Peter Pan collar. So fucking what?”
[Glamour]